Clackamas River Water case study: solidifies assets tracking with SAManage

1. CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Clackamas River Water solidifies
assets tracking with SAManage
BACKGROUND
Clackamas River Water (CRW) is a domestic water supply district that serves
Oregon’s Clackamas County, located in the southeastern part of the Portland
metropolitan area. The CRW organization views excellent service as the core of its
business. Its mission statement is to provide the highest quality water and services
at the right time, the right place, and the right price.
Needless to say, a functional and smoothly operating information technology is
“SAManage gives us one of the keys to the success of the organization in attainting its service
excellence mission. Overseeing the IT department at Clackamas River Water is
the visibility to see Quincy Whitfield, its Information Technology & Security Manager.
if any computers
are running CHALLENGES
applications they With desktops, laptops, and server machines installed at the organization’s two
office locations, real-time tracking of all hardware and software is imperative for
are not supposed to, ensuring effective management of these assets.
so we can work with Over the years, CRW has put in place a number of IT Asset Management solutions,
ranging from Excel spreadsheet to a custom Microsoft Access application. “Excel
the users to remove was too rudimentary, and the Access application was too much work to maintain,”
these risks “ says Whitfield.
Following that experience, CRW decided to deploy a commercial IT Asset
Quincy Whitfield Management application, and implemented the Dell eSMART Software-as-a-
IS Manager Service solution. Unfortunately, it did not provide the relief Whitfield was
expecting. “Generating reports with eSMART was too complicated,” says Whitfield.
These difficulties became an issue when preparing a budget for equipment
upgrade. Whitfield was attempting to generate a report of the oldest desktops in
the organizations, including their locations and specifications. “It wasn’t user
friendly-enough for me to just go into the application and figure out how to
generate these reports,” he adds.

2. SOLUTION
After an introduction to the SAManage on-demand IT Asset Management solution,
Whitefield was able to quickly deploy the application and get the agents up and
running on all machines. “With eSMART we had some issues with the agents
running on different versions of Windows; we did not come across such issues
with SAManage,” notes Whitfield.
“Configuration and “The introductory training we received from SAManage was very good,” adds
setup were well- Whitfield. “And because configuration and setup were well-defined for tracking of
IT Assets, I have been able to quickly move forward and start monitoring assets.”
defined for tracking
According to Whitfield, it was important to CRW that SAManage was an on-
of IT Assets, I have demand solution: “We have enough installed products to manage. Software-As-a-
Service models take a lot of the deployment grunt work out of the picture.”
been able to quickly
move forward and
start monitoring
BENEFITS
assets” With SAManage in place, CRW is better able to track assets and generate the
required reports. “SAManage helps us solidify assets tracking so we can start
showing the correlation between the assets we are using and what’s in our
accounting records,” says Whitfield.
SAManage will also help Whitfield educate users to minimize the exposure to
malicious software, which could pose a risk to the entire network. “SAManage
gives us the visibility to see if any computers are running applications they are not
supposed to, so we can work with the users to remove these risks.”
In addition, Whitfield is expecting SAManage to provide a boost to the use of a help
desk application for reporting incidents by users. “We currently use SharePoint for
our help desk. Even after a few years, only 10% of the organization actually uses it,
while the rest still resort to email and phone calls which are difficult to track and
manage. I believe these people will be more likely to use an application such as
SAManage with a professionally-looking, easy-to-access user interface for
submitting and tracking IT incidents.”
The integrated help desk and asset management solution will also enable CRW to
tie incident information to specific hardware and software assets. “This will help
us better assess which computers may require an upgrade,” explains Whitfield.
SAManage is a leading provider of secure, on-demand IT Management services that helps companies
manage their PC and software assets, organize software licenses and IT contracts, and detect risks and
license compliance gaps. Delivered as an on-demand service with no software or servers required,
SAManage empowers companies of all sizes with capabilities that were previously available only to
large companies. SAManage is easily deployed across multiple locations within minutes and provides
visibility into complex IT infrastructures, making it easy to automate and simplify the daily tasks
associated with establishing IT governance, control, and compliance. For more information visit
www.samanage.com or call 1-888-250-8971.